These Salvadoran youths would consolidate into their own gang and call themselves La Mara Salvatrucha, becoming one more Los Angeles gang fighting for turf, drug distribution networks, and respect. Sometime later, not too much later according to Sanz and Martinez’s sources, the MS and 18th Street turned on each other. How the break between the two rivals occurred, and how it escalated into an ongoing blood feud, is lost to history. It is said that Salvadoran members of 18th Street asked for permission to leave and begin their own gang, and when 18th Street refused, the Salvadorans left anyway, creating a schism that widened and hardened over the years. Another version has it that the MS killed an 18th Street member by accident in a drive-by, and the tit-for-tat killing never ended. Yet another version links the definitive break to a fight between the two gangs’ leaders over a particularly beautiful woman, tying the age-old myth of feminine temptation leading to man’s downfall into the gangs’ origin stories.
Perhaps none of these stories is true; perhaps they all are. In any case, the making of profound enmity never occurs in a single moment. Love and hate, allies and enemies—these relationships form and crystallize over many actions and many years until the layers of sediment harden into bedrock, until that hatred is a natural, unquestioned thing. But gang history is an oral history, and as such, particular events are pulled out of the flow of time or thrust back into it, becoming watershed moments changing the course of history itself. But we know that history doesn’t work like this; it only becomes so when we try to go back and reconstruct it to make sense of the present.40
The Flow of Fantasy and Flesh
In the early 1990s, riding a tide of national consternation in the wake of the Rodney King riots, the Moral Majority in the United States targeted Latinos suspected of gang membership for arrest and deportation. They were the vanguard of the “alien threat”: foreign criminals destroying the inner cities of America. Men and women picked up in raids or culled from US prisons found themselves fast-tracked into deportation, loaded onto planes, and sent back “home.”41
Most had never returned to their country of origin since leaving as small children and now found themselves adrift in a harsh, alien environment. Mainstream Guatemalan society rejected them wholesale. Central America’s civil wars were grinding to a close, and these deportees represented the deeply entrenched troubles of the new democracy, the libertine-ism spawned by the arrival of liberty. For gang-involved deportees, setting up gangs in the style of those they had left behind was a strategic means of survival. They found many youths willing and eager to join, even if they had no idea what being part of a mara would mean. As Silence mused, he and other boys he knew growing up poor and abandoned were “ready for a future in which we could join a transnational gang, but we were really just aficionados. It was more like a hobby.”
Coming from the United States and all it stood for, these deportees found they had a marked cultural cachet among poor urban youth. Their allure was rooted, at least in part, in the Hollywood images they so closely resembled. As planeloads of deportees touched down in Guatemala, Latino gangster films made in Hollywood—films like Sangre por Sangre and American Me—inspired Guatemalan youths to emulate what they saw. Such films may even have been key conduits in the transnational transfusions that brought the mara phenomenon to Central America. For example, I was talking to Estuardo—a Barrio18 member approaching the end of a six-year sentence for involvement in an extortion ring—about a recent prison riot when he abruptly shifted the conversation to the clique he had joined twenty years earlier. He claimed it was the first Barrio18 affiliate in zone 5 of Guatemala City, and the members called themselves Los Vatos Locos.42 In the film Sangre por Sangre (the same movie Andy seemed to reenact), Los Vatos Locos is the name of the protagonist’s street gang, caught in turf battles with the Tres Puntos. These were fictionalized amalgams, drawing their names and styles from early Los Angeles Latino street gangs. Soon after Sangre por Sangre’s 1993 release, groups of youths calling themselves Los Vatos Locos emerged in zones throughout Guatemala City.
Forged in feedback loops between the “real thing” and its Hollywood simulacrum, this new way of being a gang was defined by more solidarity, more brotherliness, and distinct forms of self-expression.43 Acolytes of this new order hewed to an imported ideal of deathless brotherhood and barrio pride, sporting the clothing, language, and of course, tattoos of the North. They were eager to learn the logistical organization and strategies that had made Latino street gangs in the United States sustainable, even multigenerational organizations. “Snyper was his name,” recalled José, one of three surviving members of an early Barrio18 clique in zone 18.
He was an 18 of Hollywood Gangster . . . from the United States. When we met him he came talking half Spanish, half English. He would tell us that we had to learn to speak like that to be more involved and focused with the gang. He came with this ideology of expanding ourselves, to make our territory bigger. We only had the actual park, it was the only sanctuary that we had, and we were living on the brink of war all the time. From there, it was only about four blocks to where the MS were. El Snyper organized us. He began organizing the money to gather when somebody got arrested and needed a lawyer to get him out, or to buy weapons. Because our clique had no guns. I had a shotgun, but it was homemade. . . . And so we started making contacts with the police, and they would sell us arms and bullets.
Like the vast majority of this generation of mareros, Jose’s former compatriots are dead and gone. But the logic of solidarity and organization that they took on would spread beyond particular gang cliques, transforming into allegiance to gang pacts and codes that seemed, for a time, to order when, where, and against whom gang violence could occur. By joining up with the MS or Barrio18, the gangs that would come to dominate and subsume the rest, newly minted mareros were supposed to take on their gang’s codes of allegiance and revenge, imported from the streets and prisons of Southern California. The first was the age-old feud between Barrio18 and the MS, which would map onto and transform already present street rivalries in Guatemala City. The second was the ideology of the Southern United Raza (SUR), an unstable but influential article of faith enforcing solidarity among imprisoned Latino gang members in Southern California. The introduction of these two doctrines in Guatemala City and other Central American cities would integrate into and transform the “architecture of enmity” that carved up urban space, prisons, and postwar society itself.44
MS13, BARRIO18, AND THE SUR
I met Triste while he was serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery in Canada prison, located sixty kilometers southwest of Guatemala City. We would talk in his quarters—a tin-roofed shack—as prisoners came and went asking him to etch tattoos into their skin with his homemade rig. When he was nine years old, sick of the squalor and his abusive father, Triste made the journey solo from a Guatemala City slum to Los Angeles to join his mom. He got into trouble in middle school and more in high school, and after a few years in juvenile hall, he joined a gang called Widmer Sreet. At twenty-two he ended up in adult prison for selling drugs, and it was there that he had his first contact with the Mexican Mafia.
The birth of the Mexican Mafia (MM or La Eme) is another canonical story in US gang history. The Mexican Mafia is said to have originated in Deuel Vocational Institute (DVI) in Tracy, California, in the late 1950s.45 It was an adult facility but also became the last stop for the California juvenile detention system’s worst youthful offenders. According to gang intervention specialists, youth entering DVI called it “gladiator’s school” because of the need to constantly fight in order to hold your own. Housed with adult criminals, youth prisoners were constantly picked on. A group of Mexican Americans is said to have founded La Eme as a means of self-protection. As the story goes, Rodolfo Cadena, a seventeen-year-old from East Los Angeles, recruited other young toughs into a cohesive group to defend themselves against older inmates: against the bullying, sexual molestation, and general victimization that were and remain an everyday part of US prison life.46
Today,